Railway freight transport and logistics: Methods for relief, algorithms for verification and proposals for the adjustment of tunnel inner surfaces

In Europe, the attention to efficiency and safety of international railway freight transport has grown in recent years and this has drawn attention to the importance of verifying the clearance between vehicle and lining, mostly when different and variable rolling stock types are expected. This work consists of defining an innovative methodology, with the objective of surveying the tunnel structures, verifying the clearance conditions, and designing a retrofitting work if necessary. The method provides for the use of laser scanner, thermocameras, and ground penetrating radar to survey the geometrical and structural conditions of the tunnel; an algorithm written by the authors permits to verify the clearances. Two different types of works are possible if the inner tunnel surfaces interfere with the profile of the rolling stock passing through: modification of the railroad track or modification of the tunnel intrados by mean milling of its lining. The presented case study demonstrates that the proposed methodology is useful for verifying compatibility between the design vehicle gauge and the existing tunnel intrados, and to investigate the chance to admit rolling stocks from different states. Consequently, the results give the railway management body a chance to perform appropriate measurements in those cases where the minimum clearance requirements are not achieved

Rail Track Detection and Projection-Based 3D Modeling from UAV Point Cloud

The expansion of the railway industry has increased the demand for the three-dimensional modeling of railway tracks. Due to the increasing development of UAV technology and its application advantages, in this research, the detection and 3D modeling of rail tracks are investigated using dense point clouds obtained from UAV images. Accordingly, a projection-based approach based on the overall direction of the rail track is proposed in order to generate a 3D model of the railway. In order to extract the railway lines, the height jump of points is evaluated in the neighborhood to select the candidate points of rail tracks. Then, using the RANSAC algorithm, line fitting on these candidate points is performed, and the final points related to the rail are identified. In the next step, the pre-specified rail piece model is fitted to the rail points through a projection-based process, and the orientation parameters of the model are determined. These parameters are later improved by fitting the Fourier curve, and finally a continuous 3D model for all of the rail tracks is created. The geometric distance of the final model from rail points is calculated in order to evaluate the modeling accuracy. Moreover, the performance of the proposed method is compared with another approach. A median distance of about 3 cm between the produced model and corresponding point cloud proves the high quality of the proposed 3D modeling algorithm in this study

Capturing natural-colour 3D models of insects for species discovery

Collections of biological specimens are fundamental to scientific understanding and characterization of natural diversity. This paper presents a system for liberating useful information from physical collections by bringing specimens into the digital domain so they can be more readily shared, analyzed, annotated and compared. It focuses on insects and is strongly motivated by the desire to accelerate and augment current practices in insect taxonomy which predominantly use text, 2D diagrams and images to describe and characterize species. While these traditional kinds of descriptions are informative and useful, they cannot cover insect specimens "from all angles" and precious specimens are still exchanged between researchers and collections for this reason. Furthermore, insects can be complex in structure and pose many challenges to computer vision systems. We present a new prototype for a practical, cost-effective system of off-the-shelf components to acquire natural-colour 3D models of insects from around 3mm to 30mm in length. Colour images are captured from different angles and focal depths using a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera rig and two-axis turntable. These 2D images are processed into 3D reconstructions using software based on a visual hull algorithm. The resulting models are compact (around 10 megabytes), afford excellent optical resolution, and can be readily embedded into documents and web pages, as well as viewed on mobile devices. The system is portable, safe, relatively affordable, and complements the sort of volumetric data that can be acquired by computed tomography. This system provides a new way to augment the description and documentation of insect species holotypes, reducing the need to handle or ship specimens. It opens up new opportunities to collect data for research, education, art, entertainment, biodiversity assessment and biosecurity control.Comment: 24 pages, 17 figures, PLOS ONE journa

Multi-Scale Hierarchical Conditional Random Field for Railway Electrification Scene Classification Using Mobile Laser Scanning Data

With the recent rapid development of high-speed railway in many countries, precise inspection for railway electrification systems has become more significant to ensure safe railway operation. However, this time-consuming manual inspection is not satisfactory for the high-demanding inspection task, thus a safe, fast and automatic inspection method is required. With LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data becoming more available, the accurate railway electrification scene understanding using LiDAR data becomes feasible towards automatic 3D precise inspection. This thesis presents a supervised learning method to classify railway electrification objects from Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) data. First, a multi-range Conditional Random Field (CRF), which characterizes not only labeling homogeneity at a short range, but also the layout compatibility between different objects at a middle range in the probabilistic graphical model is implemented and tested. Then, this multi-range CRF model will be extended and improved into a hierarchical CRF model to consider multi-scale layout compatibility at full range. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset collected in Korea with complex railway electrification systems environment. The experiment shows the effectiveness of proposed model

Mapping for Indoor Walking Environment from Point Clouds by Using Mobile Mapping Systems

Walkability is one of the issues to be addressed in the planning of smart urban cities. Although, there is a substantial amount of studies on outdoor walking pedestrian, limited study has been done to address indoor walkability. Recently, most of the pedestrians are likely to use indoor route than outdoor route to protect themselves from sun and rain as most of the indoor routes are located on the buildings such as shopping mall and rail transit station. Therefore, it important to collect all the relevant information in the indoor building to addressed the walkability issues. The GeoSLAM ZEB REVO scanner is used for its convenience to access narrow space, busy area and complex building structure. This scanner is portable and easy to handle by the operator as it can be attached on the cart or carry it with backpack. The scanner captures the building geometry and facilities and present it in the form of point cloud. Then necessary information can be extracted from the point cloud using point cloud segmentation method. The end user such as town planner can benefit from the final product to design future building with pedestrian-friendly tool to encourage more people to walk. Therefore, it brings impact to the society by providing the healthy lifestyle in addition to reducing the use of private vehicle on the road

Digital twinning of railway overhead line equipment from airborne lidar data

The automated generation of geometry-only digital twins of Overhead Line Equipment (OLE) system in existing railways from point clouds is an unsolved problem. Currently, this process is highly reliant upon manual inputs, needing 10 times more labour hours than scanning the physical asset. The resulting modelling cost counteracts the expected benefits of the digital twin. We tackle this challenge using a novel model-driven method that exploits the highly regulated and standardised nature of railways. It starts by restricting the search for OLE elements relative to point clusters of the railway masts. The resulting point clusters of the OLE elements are then converged with various parametric models of different catenary configurations to verify the presence of OLE elements and to find the best possible fit. The method outputs a geometry-only digital twin of the OLE system in Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) format. The method was tested on an 18 km railway point cloud and achieves overall detection rates of 93.2% F1 score for OLE cables and 98.1% F1 score for other OLE elements. The accuracy of the generated model is evaluated using distance-based metrics between the ground truth model and the automated model. The average modelling distance is 3.82 cm Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) for all 18 km dataCambridge Commonwealth, European & International Trust Bentley Systems UK Plc

PORTABLE MULTI-CAMERA SYSTEM: FROM FAST TUNNEL MAPPING TO SEMI-AUTOMATIC SPACE DECOMPOSITION AND CROSS-SECTION EXTRACTION

The paper outlines the first steps of a research project focused on the digitalization of underground tunnels for the mining industry. The aim is to solve the problem of rapidly, semi-automatically, efficiently, and reliably digitizing complex and meandering tunnels. A handheld multi-camera photogrammetric tool is used for the survey phase, which allows for the rapid acquisition of the image dataset needed to produce the 3D data. Moreover, since often, automatic, and fast acquisitions are not supported by easy-to-use tools to access and use the data at an operational level, a second aim of the research is to define a method able to arrange and organise the gathered data so that it would be easily accessible. The proposed approach is to compute the 3D skeleton of the surveyed environment by employing tools developed for the analysis of vascular networks in medical imagery. From the computed skeletonization of the underground tunnels, a method is proposed to automatically extrapolate valuable information such as cross-sections, decomposed portions of the tunnel, and the referenced images from the photogrammetric survey. The long-term research goal is to create an effective workflow, both at the hardware and software level, that can reduce computation times, process large amounts of data, and reduce dependency on high levels of experience

CONTAINER SHIP CELL GUIDE ACCURACY CHECK TECHNOLOGY BASED ON IMPROVED 3D POINT CLOUD INSTANCE SEGMENTATION

Generally, cell guides are installed in the cargo hold of container ships, which improve the loading and unloading efficiency of containers and fix containers when the ship is sailing. However, in actual production, due to the low accuracy of ship loading in sections, and the deviation of welding shrinkage and expansion in relevant sections, errors occur in the loading process of containers, resulting in hidden safety risks or significant economic losses. Given the above situation, it is particularly important to find a high-efficiency cell guide accuracy inspection method for construction monitoring. 3D scanner to obtain three-dimensional data is presented in this paper, based on this paper proposes a new method, this method will be used based on improved instances of 3 d point cloud segmentation model to cell guide the segmentation, and fitting container ship cell guide structure, and then realize the function of container simulation test box, cell guide after the segmentation precision inspection at the same time, for the practicality review, we compared the accuracy data gained from inspection simulation and the measured data. As a result, it was confirmed that both values were within about ±1.5mm. The validity, and reliability of the method are further verified

Desenvolvemento de modelos de información de infraestructuras segundo estándares abertos e parametrización automática a partir de datos xeomáticos.

It seeks to develop procedures that allow generating information models of these structures, created from the relevant information of the point clouds obtained with these systems. For this purpose, the BIM standards for civil engineering structures, both currently available and those that will be published for the duration of the thesis, will be exploited and adopted. Information modeling techniques will be used in these standards, with the aim of obtaining a system that allows modeling the structures automatically. The models will also be made compatible with other methodologies designed for BIM, whose purpose is to take full advantage of the information available for management and maintenance tasks. Meeting these objectives, an automatic modeling system will be developed according to the BIM standards for transport infrastructures, suitable for automatic feeding from geomatic data and remote sensing, which is in turn integrable into management and maintenance systems for these types of structures of civil engineering.Esta tesis busca el desarrollo de metodologías para la exportación de la información geomática de infraestructuras de transporte, particularmente estructuras ferroviarias y carreteras, obtenida mediante tecnologías de mapeado móvil. Se busca desarrollar procedimientos que permitan generar modelos de información de estas estructuras, creados a partir de la información relevante de las nubes de puntos obtenidas con estos sistemas. Con este propósito, se explotarán y adoptarán los estándares BIM para estructuras de ingeniería civil, tanto los actualmente disponibles como aquellos que serán publicados durante la duración de la tesis. Se utilizarán técnicas de modelado de información en estos estándares, con objetivo de obtener un sistema que permita realizar un modelado de las estructuras de manera automática. Se llevará a cabo también la compatibilización los modelos con otras metodologías diseñadas para BIM, cuyo propósito es el aprovechamiento total de la información disponible para tareas de gestión y mantenimiento. Cumpliendo estos objetivos se desarrollará un sistema automático de modelado según los estándares BIM para infraestructuras de transporte, apto para su alimentación automática a partir de datos geomáticos y teledetección, el cual es a su vez integrable en sistemas de gestión y mantenimiento para este tipo de estructuras de ingeniería civil.Esta tese busca o desenvolvemento de metodoloxías para a exportación da información xeomática de infraestruturas de transporte, particularmente estruturas ferroviarias e estradas, obtida mediante tecnoloxías de mapeado móbil. A tese busca o desenvolvemento de procedementos que permitan xerar modelos de información destas estruturas, creados a partir da información relevante das nubes de puntos obtidas con estes sistemas. Con este propósito, se explotarán e adoptarán os estándares BIM para estruturas de enxeñería civil, tanto os actualmente dispoñibles como aqueles que serán publicados durante a duración da tese. Utilizaranse técnicas de modelado de información nestes estándares, con obxectivo de obter un sistema que permita realizar un modelado das estruturas de maneira automática. Levarase a cabo tamén a compatibilización dos modelos con outras metodoloxías diseñadas para BIM, cuxo propósito é o aproveitamento total da información dispoñible para tarefas de xestión e mantemento. Cumplindo estes obxectivos se desenvolverá un sistema automático de modelado segundo os estándares BIM para infraestruturas de transporte, apto para a súa alimentación automática a partir de datos xeomáticos e teledetección, o cal é a súa vez integrable en sistemas de xestión e mantemento para este tipo de estruturas de enxeñería civil